Expeditions: Conquistador - Update #19, Release Date Shifted

The most recent update for Expeditions: Conquistadors informs us of a shift in the release date, without mentioning the new date and also that they now have multiplayer support.

Let's just get the bad news out of the way first: we have to push the release date. I suppose this is particularly disappointing given both the lateness of the announcement as well as the fact that everybody has been lauding us for making the release date, but this is how it is: the game is in a pretty good state, and we could release it now, under other circumstances. Of course we're missing some of the polish we'd like to apply to the game, but it works, it's playable, and it's good fun.

Unfortunately some distribution complications have come up. We're honestly not sure how much we're supposed to talk about this, and I don't want to cast anybody as the villain here - nobody has done anything wrong, it's just that kind of situation where things turned out to be a little more complicated than we'd hoped, and we need a little extra time to get our ducks in a row.

The upshot is that we'll have time to finish polishing the game, implementing the last little nice-to-have animations and helpful GUI details, and testing it more thoroughly to make sure there are as few bugs as possible upon release. Additionally, to mitigate the disappointment of the pushed release date, we're going to release another build of the game for all Kickstarter backers who gave $30 or more. You can expect a link in your e-mail on Thursday when the game was supposed to come out.

That's not the good news though. The good news is that we're going to have multiplayer. A few of the previews that hit the Internet over the past couple of weeks mentioned it, but here's the official word: Expeditions: Conquistador will feature a hotseat and TCP/IP skirmish mode where you and a friend can connect to each other and pitch your tactical cunning against each other. I assure you this is not the reason for the delay - the multiplayer is already implemented and working quite nicely.

If adding multiplayer seems a bit tacked-on to you, then... you're correct. It was basically something we added for our own amusement, because the more we tested the combat in singleplayer, the more we wanted to play against each other. In particularly, I just had this powerful urge to see if I could beat our combat programmer Casper (I couldn't - in fact he completely destroyed me). I'll even admit that the multiplayer has in fact detracted a little bit from the singleplayer, in that Casper has had less time to polish the campaign because he had to work on the multiplayer, but now that we have a little extra time on the clock, we'll be able to catch up on that.

We'll also be able to localise the game into German, as we've long been hoping to do. I know we've flip-flopped a little on that question, as our financial situation changed along the way, but we finally sent all the text yesterday to be translated into German, a few days after our Spanish translation came back from Pink Noise (and word from Juan is that it's very nicely translated, and they really hit the right tone for the game).